JIRA "Administrator email" sending capability

It'd be extremely useful if JIRA made it possible to choose one or more of the JIRA user groups and be able to send email to those groups in the administration interface. This would make it very easy to notify the JIRA users in the organization of any changes in JIRA configuration and/or of new releases etc.

Right now sending similar emails requires separate administration of the email lists which is quite tedious and often results in the separate email list being out of synch of the actual JIRA user database.